[liberalbias998]

I agree: here are some good examples of fast interactive dynamic languages

- Strongtalk from the 1990s

- Pharo Smalltalk (Cog VM)

Also worth looking at

- Chez Scheme

And

- JavaScript in every popular modern browser.

And

- Luajit

[elcritch]

An interesting thing about all those examples are that they’re fairly streamlined languages making it easier to write good accelerators. Even JS only has one prototype system and lots of functions. All in contrast to Python which has a quite complex runtime and accidental complexity in the language design details.